What's squirting out of the brewhouse this week?

02.26.2009

Hello friends,

This week is a busy, busy week in the brewhouse. We started the week with some old favorites; 120 and Immort. Not only do these behemoths require long fermentation times, they also chew up a good bit of the earth's rotation to get them into fermentation. These six brews took us well into Tuesday evening to complete (we can finish about ten 60 Minute IPA brews in the same time frame). Once we muscled thru what are these most labor intensive brews, it was onto the week's 60 which led into 90 and we'll be rounding the week out with a healthy amount of Indian Brown Ale and Raison.

The cellars are hella busy keeping up with the pace in the brewhouse what with wranglin' yeast and flipping tanks and all. We're nearing full implementation of our ozone sanitation technology which is saving us time and money as well as water in that we use less and each bit of ozonated sanitization water is used twice. It's also proven quite a bit safer than the chemicals we're phasing out. Green, safe and inexpensive! What more can you ask for.

We're in the starting phases of the installation of our in line carbonation unit. This improvement will ensure better consistency, reduced beer handling and manipulating which can effect beer flavor, aroma, and appearance, and increased microbiological stability. We're really looking forward to using this equipment.

The welders are hard at work building our firkin washer.This unit will include the same ozone technology mentioned earlier to reduce water consumption, cycle times, and energy use while ensuring excellent sanitation. Our whole leaf hops for dryhopping the 75 Minute IPA arrive on Monday of next week and the first batch will be prepared on Tuesday. We'll fill the firkins the following week to get them ready to ship on the 16th of March. This is going to be delicious.

The year's first batch of Burton is nearing the end of it's oak aging and it tastes tremendous. I gave a sample to Brent on Monday and ten minutes later, all of the brewers had made a trip to Oak Tank One to revel in the deliciousness of their efforts. Well done, Fellas.

That's pretty much all I can think of right now, so we'll check back in next week for another update.